Uber’s India tech team gets a new mobility head, 85 more engineers to be hired

Uber has brought Manikandan Thangarathnam on board as the new mobility head and is also going to hire 85 more engineers for the team.

Uber is also hiring 85 more engineers in the country in addition to 140 engineers Uber announced it was hiring last month. (REUTERS)

Uber has hired Amazon veteran Manikandan Thangarathnam as senior director to lead all rider and platform engineering teams in Bangalore. Besides this, Uber is also hiring 85 more engineers in the country in addition to 140 engineers Uber announced it was hiring last month.

Thangarathnam has been brought on board to strengthen Uber's tech capabilities, as the company wants to position its India arm as a technology hub that's “building and innovating for the world”.

Thangarathnam comes with over 20 years of experience in spearheading engineering efforts across global majors, including a 13-year stint at Amazon, building several core platforms and products. In his most recent role, Thangarathnam led engineering efforts for the Amazon Appstore and was instrumental in bootstrapping the tech major's Chennai office and building a vast team of engineers.

Uber said in a press statement that its tech expansion plans in India are “in line with its vision to make mobility and delivery more accessible, and to become the backbone of transportation in thousands of cities across the globe”.

Mobility and platform teams in Uber are responsible for building all technologies that move riders and enable drivers to earn on a dynamic marketplace platform in cities across the world, Uber explained.

The Rider mobility team works on the challenge of enabling the next billion trips by building new services including high capacity vehicles (Uber bus) and car rentals, among others. The Marketplace team is building a highly-available and scalable self-serve gateway to configure, manage, and monitor Application Programming Interfaces (API) of every business domain at Uber.

Uber recently also hired Jayaram Valliyur as senior director to lead its global finance technology team, spread across multiple geographies. Prior to Uber, Jayaram, too, worked at Amazon for 14 years, where he was responsible for bootstrapping and scaling its India development center.